Word: gamma
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Virologists, pediatricians and public health officials have worked out a compromise. They give the live vaccine, and at the same time they give an injection of human gamma globulin, the blood fraction that contains antibodies against measles as well as against other diseases. The "GG" has staved off fever in all but about 20% of children already double-vaccinated and has eliminated the rash in all but 3%. Most important, the GG does not keep the children from developing enough of their own antibodies to give them lasting protection against natural measles...
...cotton swab, for example, can be rubbed over a suspect's hand, irradiated, and its gamma rays studied to determine whether the man has fired a gun. Infinitesimal traces of gunpowder components left on the hand by explosion gases show up unmistakably under neutron analysis...
...normal man could freeze to death without first feeling the cold. None could fry without feeling the heat. But burning and freezing are ancient dangers, and nature has had plenty of time to evolve defenses. X rays and gamma rays are a subtler peril. Until recently, they were unimportant hazards in the human environment; evolution largely ignored them. Modern man can wander unheeding into strong radiation that he cannot feel, see, hear, smell or taste. And unless he carries an artificial radiation sense (a Geiger counter, ionization chamber, etc.), he may get a fatal dose without a suspicion...
Blue Flash. Scientists have known for decades, says Hunt, that the dark-adapted human eye can detect X rays and gamma rays as a yellow-green glow. This sensation apparently comes from direct action of the rays on minute light-sensitive cells in the eye's retina, but it has almost no value as a practical warning sense. When the eye is not darkadapted, and it hardly ever is, the retina is sensitive only to massive doses of radiation from such disasters as runaway nuclear reactors. On these unhappy occasions, the victim sees a vivid blue flash...
...Wellington, a farm supply center of 550 people in northern Colorado. His father, a lumberman, was town mayor-and a devoted Republican. Byron was valedictorian of his five-member high school class, went to the University of Colorado in nearby Boulder, where he waited table at the Phi Gamma Delta house, slung hash in a sorority, made Phi Beta Kappa-and became a Democrat. These were Depression years, and White was impressed by Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. "It seemed to me," he recalls, "that the Democrats had the more forward-looking programs." Hall of Fame...